My Prediction in a Box: The Alternative MLB Playoff Preview

Ten years ago, I was a beat writer, covering the Toronto Blue Jays. They were a spectacularly middling team, but they were good to write about, because they had some interesting characters.

Among them were three young pitchers: Kelvim Escobar, Chris Carpenter, and Roy Halladay. One of the local writers liked to call them "The Tantalizing Trio." The collective nickname never took, but it was apt — each of them had something that made him seem as though he might be special one day.

Escobar had a terrific fastball and a legendary penis. (Toronto's giggling clubbies bought him a Bobby Hull hockey jersey and poor Escobar had no idea why; it was because of the curve in his stick.) Carpenter was a bit of a hothead but everybody was impressed when he came back from a bloody beaning with no ill effects. And Halladay... Halladay was just this nice, likeable kid from Colorado who had a great arm but couldn't quite put it together. Halladay was the biggest mystery among them.

The manager at the time was Jim Fregosi. He was the Phillies manager when the Blue Jays won the World Series over Philadelphia in 1993 — Joe Carter hit his home run off Mitch Williams, and I jumped up and split my head open on a TV hanging in our dorm's common room — so it was always kind of weird to see him in the Toronto manager's office. But Fregosi was a long-time student of pitching, and he was the right manager for a team with so much potential on the mound.

His management style was based partly on deflection. He would say or do something ridiculous to distract the beat guys from what the players were failing to do on the field. That way we'd overlook Homer Bush's three-error game or the fact that Brad Fullmer was going to murder somebody.

Fregosi also liked to pick on one of the writers at each bullshitting session, without fail, as a bait-and-switch. I was young and nervous and an easy target. I also asked the occasional stupid question. So I was often that guy.

One night, after a terrible game, Fregosi was sitting behind his desk, naked, except for the white towel wrapped around his belly. He was smoking a cigarette. We all kind of traipsed in there, ready for Fregosi's big act. I sat on the low couch in front of the desk. The first couple of questions were lobs, and Fregosi batted them back, building up steam. Then I asked a question — it was about Escobar's off-speed pitches, which weren't fooling anybody — and Fregosi rose up from behind his desk like a great blubbery tsunami.

He was hollering at me for my general idiocy, smoke pouring out of every hole in his body. He began taking short steps toward me, where I remained trapped on the couch. He was throwing his arms around and now he was screaming at the top of his lungs. And then his towel fell off, and Fregosi's dick was swinging maybe two feet in front of my face. It was the closest I'd been to another man's junk. It was not a happy moment for me.

And it went on, interminable, on and on and on, as Fregosi continued to scorch me, his crotch inching closer and closer to my face. He never made contact, but it was like being threatened with facial assault by a short, fat garden hose. My only comfort, and it was a cold one, was that he'd just come out of the shower.

Finally, the tirade ended, and Fregosi picked up his towel and went back behind his desk. I think I went into shock. The session was done, for everyone except for me. The story of Fregosi's dick and my face made the rounds, growing exponentially as it traveled from American League city to city. Fregosi became Kelvim Escobar. I was beaten within an inch of my life by his great hockey stick, left bloody on the office carpet. It was funny, but it wasn't. There was nothing like walking into the clubhouse at Yankee Stadium, gawking at Thurman Munson's empty locker, and hearing a guy behind me whisper, "That's the kid who took Jim Fregosi's dick in the face."

What made everything weirder was that Fregosi suddenly became something different to me afterward. Maybe he felt bad about the whole thing, but from then on, every week we'd meet at the end of the dugout during BP, and he would give me off-the-record lessons about the game we both loved. That time was invaluable for me. Baseball guys watch baseball differently than the rest of us do, and Fregosi helped me see what he saw. He especially helped me understand pitching. I can remember at the end of the season, we were in Cleveland, and he gave me a forty-five-minute lesson on the change-up. It was beautiful. I'll never forget it.

That same conversation, we also talked about The Tantalizing Trio's possible paths. Halladay's problem, Fregosi believed, was that he was wedded to a weird little pitch, a knuckle curve that he had been taught years before by an ancient mentor back home. It was a neat pitch — and I think every pitcher likes to think he has something special in his arsenal — but it didn't really work. At that time, Halladay's fastball didn't move much, and his knuckle curve didn't move much, either. Blast off. And yet Halladay didn't want to part with it. Fregosi said Halladay was such a sweet guy, he probably held onto the pitch partly out of love for that old man.

But watch out, Fregosi said. When Halladay gives up that pitch, and he learns how to finesse his others, he'll win everything he wants to.

That session in Cleveland was our last. Fregosi was fired that winter. The following spring, in 2001, Halladay told me that he saw no reason to give up his knuckle curve, and I remembered what Jim Fregosi said. Sure enough, Halladay had a short, mediocre season. But then in 2002, he finally gave it up. He focused on making his other pitches move more instead. The guy transformed, seemingly overnight, into a machine. He became, for me, the pitcher I would most want on the mound to save my life, especially if I needed nine innings. He won everything he wanted to.

Except for a World Series. Toronto never gave him that chance. Now Philadelphia has, helped along by Halladay's amazing year. Somewhere, Jim Fregosi is older, probably a little fatter, probably sitting naked, wrapped only in a white towel, and smiling because his would-be ace has finally figured everything out, and with the team that Fregosi always loved the most.

That's why I like the Phillies to win the World Series — and Roy Halladay to become the first pitcher to throw 99 innings in a single postseason.

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